Why Data Is the Key To Solving Your Email Marketing Challenges
Email marketing is a highly effective way to reach your prospects and engage your customers. But that doesn’t mean it comes without challenges.
Deliverability, open and click-through rates, conversions and ROI are the kinds of things that keep email marketers up at night.
But you can rest easy. Here are three common challenges we see email marketers face and how data can help you conquer them.
1. Measuring Engagement
Measuring engagement is one of the most important things you can do to ensure the success of your email marketing. It’s also one of the trickiest.
By collecting data points like opens, clicks, conversions and unsubscribes, you gain insight into what’s working (and what isn’t) and can even gage a prospect’s level of interest to prioritize follow-ups. But your email—and the content you’re linking to—have to be set up to capture the data.
And that’s where it gets tricky. Your email requires one tracking point while the content you link to requires another. If those separate points aren’t applied or connected correctly, you’re losing data.
If you work with a third-party email marketing provider, they should have to tools and expertise to apply the links and make the connections for you. We should know; it’s something we help our clients with regularly.
If you’re going it alone, selecting a top-tier tracking platform is crucial. Not only will the technology capture the data, but the platform’s experts can also help identify tracking gaps and run traces on website links so you can see the whole picture.
2. Inbox Deliverability
Before you can track anything, you have to make sure your email makes it into the inbox.
Inbox deliverability is the most common challenge we hear about. However, low deliverability rates are often symptomatic of a larger problem like poor sender reputation, inaccurate records or irrelevant content.
Senders with a bad reputation are often marked as spam, relegating their emails to blocked or junk status. Data helps you decrease opt-outs, bounce rates and other strikes against your reputation so you can build a good standing and reach your target audience.
When was the last time you cleaned up your email list? Performing regular maintenance such as eliminating duplicate records, removing incomplete or outdated data and ensuring new subscribers are accurately mapped to data selects increase your odds of getting your email into the inbox.
If content is the issue, you may need to take a closer look at your audience. Consider data points such as gender, age, household income, marital status, online behavior or even industry-specific interests when crafting your subject lines and emails to align with their interests and improve your chances of moving from the junk box to the inbox.
3. Personalization
Making it into the inbox is great, but it’s not enough. Consumers expect experiences that put their wants, needs and preferences first. And it’s not easy to do unless you “know” your customers.
Data gives you insight into customer preferences, enabling you to create dynamic content that resonates with their specific requirements. Almost every part of your email marketing campaign can (and should) be personalized to improve your customer experience, from sender names and subject lines to copy, images and offers.
Say you’re selling a washing machine: an image of a stylish washer fitting just right into a studio apartment might resonate with the 20-somethings on your email list but miss the mark with the 35-and-older crowd. So you create an alternate image that highlights the washer’s ability to take on a busy family’s laundry needs and apply the same rule to the email’s headline and call to action—making the email relevant for both audiences.
Data is the key to email marketing success
Having the right kind and quality of data as well as the right technology to service that data is the key to solving most email marketing challenges.
When you commit to superior data, your customers (and their inboxes) will thank you.